Dépressions de voyage: Réécritures de l\u27ailleurs, de Michaux à Chevillard

The notion of a fin des voyages (Lévi-Strauss, 1955) is taken here to describe less the end of travel than an impasse affecting the writing of travel. In the course of a century that has seen the end of terrae incognitae, unprecedented growth in tourism and media, decolonization and a sustained critique of erstwhile exoticizing discourses, writing is increasingly aware of the inefficacy of the language and categories traditionally used to render the Elsewhere . This dissertation examines some of the forms through which travel writing survives the supposed end of travel in 20th century French literature. In this genealogy of writings the other space is perceived to be in crisis; chapters analyze the precise sites of this crisis. A look at some writings of Henri Michaux and Jean-Paul Sartre first frames the problem in terms of an exhaustion of the narrative apparatus. Words, and therefore the récit de voyage, would seem to have lost their capacity to verify the reality of the Elsewhere. An unfinished travel narrative by Sartre and the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint further prompt a reading of the exotic impasse as being of an essentially specular nature, indissociable, since Baudelaire, from an exacerbation of the sphere of the self. The third chapter reflects on the notion of absolute travel , on fictional world tours (Jules Verne, Georges Perec, Olivier Rolin) that expose the fantasies and paradoxes of a modern pensée du monde . The question of translation as a constitutive and problematic modality of the travel genre is examined, in the next chapter, through the works of Toussaint and a novel by Vassilis Alexakis. Via Montaigne, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, another chapter analyzes the critical function of the animal in writings by Michaux and Éric Chevillard, as a site wherein the epistemology of the travel genre is subverted. The final chapter reflects on instances of spatial discontinuity in the œuvres of Perec and Nicolas Bouvier, places of dévoyage that disrupt the trajectory of the traveler and support a dystopic imaginary of the limits of space. This study could be said to analyze a poetics of the post-exotic in modern French writings